CoastLine

On this edition of Coastline, we meet two people from this community. One woman, one man. One in mid-life. One a young adult. They both live in the Cape Fear region. And while neither of them would say they feel despised or hunted or under attack here, they still must think about how mainstream local residents might respond to them. And this – the constant, necessary vigilance is the part that should not have been – but was news to this journalist.

LGBTQ: lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer or questioning. There are a host of other ways people in this community identify: including Intersex, Asexual, Pansexual, Agender, Gender Queer, Bigender, Pangender. It’s why some use the more inclusive acronym: LGBTQ+.

The exuberance of spring is axiomatic, but as every spring has its own theme, so does the spring of 2021. New life and longer days and warmer air and the riotous generosity of nature explode in stark contrast to the rigid stricture of six feet apart, masks, disinfectant, solitude. We are in a not-quite-post-pandemic planting season.

Deborah Dicks Maxwell was born in Wilmington, North Carolina and calls it home, but she’s lived and traveled around the world. Despite her boarding school days in South Carolina, college in Pittsburgh at LaRoche University, graduate schooling at East Carolina University, military tours of duty which include Korea and Operation Desert Storm, Deborah Dicks Maxwell is familiar to many local residents from her advocacy work.

America was born out of violence in a battle against taxation without representation. After winning a bloody eight-year war against Great Britain, Americans created the first modern constitutional democracy. Ratified in 1788, the United States Constitution set up a system that relied on self-government through democratic elections – theoretically, anyway, rendering violence unnecessary. But getting there included repeated violence, even terrorism, and that ideal has not held up – as we see from Shay’s Rebellion, the Whiskey Rebellion, the Civil War, even Wilmington’s own 1898 coup d’etat. Most recently, we witnessed the insurrection of January 6, 2021 – in an attempt to halt the certification of Joe Biden’s presidential election victory.

Former First Lady Michelle Obama. Comedian Chris Rock. Basketball superstar Michael Jordan. The Godfather of Soul James Brown. These are just a few of the well-known Americans who are descendants of the Gullah Geechee people.

The Creekwood community in Wilmington, a housing project often referred to as part of the inner city, is still somewhat isolated. It's a place where it’s hard to get a pizza or much else delivered because drivers fear the neighborhood violence. But it was here that a little boy lived with his mother and four siblings in the 1970s and 80s. There were extended family members, aunts and uncles, but his single mother raised her five children on her own.

Imagine having a brother who is addicted heroin. He keeps winding up in prison. You're younger, but you know better. And so you build your life without him. You grow up and one day you notice that an entire sector of the population is suffering for the same reasons your brother suffers and are caught in the same revolving door of addiction and prison. Many of these people are returning from Vietnam – where they were sent when they weren’t even fully developed adults.

The Wilmington Ten: nine men and one woman – wrongly accused and convicted of arson and conspiracy. Each of the ten serving substantial prison time for crimes they did not commit. The nine men were African-American. The woman was white. The violence that erupted in Wilmington fifty years ago, in early February 1971, was fomented by racial tension, desegregation, and active white supremacist groups facing off against black activists who were demanding equal rights and equal educational opportunities.